CHASING APHRODITE: REMOVING HUBRIS FROM THE SACRED

Abstract

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman revisions C. G. Jung’s depth psychology for a postmodern western culture, and in that re-visioning offers a critical analysis of psychoanalytic methods within modern psychology and the logos of western culture. Although Jung is recognized as returning soul to psychology, Hillman returns soul-making and charts pathways for re-remembering Aphrodite and return to the Feminine. In his 1979 publication The Thought of the Heart, Hillman writes of Jung discovering “the woman within” (Jung qtd. in Hillman 53) as psyche or soul, and describes Jung’s response as resisting, silencing and contradicting her voice. Jung’s initial response correlates to a “virginal resistance,” identified by archetypal psychologist Patricia Berry as protecting undifferentiated impersonal values (Echo’s Subtle Body 102-103,109).

Therein resides this study’s focus and inquiry: Whence comes western culture’s resistance to the feminine? The hubris of western culture’s resistance to psyche, soul and anima, critiqued throughout Hillman’s writings on soul-making, imaginational intelligence and re-visioning psychology, is viewed herein as a vehicle of distress explored via depth and archetypal frames from a Feminist perspective.

Utilizing archetypal psychology’s healing fiction amidst the relevant mythic background of Oedipus, this study examines the psychology underlying western culture’s resistance to the Feminine that moves the feminine from sacred to profane into alterity. Applying Hillman’s theory of healing fiction and soul-making as praxis for return to anima consciousness, this study correlates Berry’s concept of virginal resistance to western culture’s coagulated values, theorizes the hubris within socio-cultural regulatory practices as camouflaging western culture’s desire for the Feminine, and associates the hubris of Oedipus to the “heuristic method” of western culture (Hillman, “Oedipus Revisited” 160).

The production piece that accompanies this dissertation is a canvas for improvisation as “A Continuum in 8-Scenes.” The canvas, designed for exploratory development by an actor-ensemble trained in improvisation and physical theatre, utilizes elements from Commedia dell’Arte and slapstick to initiate a frolicking funny fanfare through 2500 years of recorded history, revealing and resisting the psychology of anima.